Kamala's Post

Kamala Randjelovic
Posting for Monday, November 19th, 2007
Question # 1
In Jonathan Lethem’s memoir “Speak, Hoyt Schmerhorn” he elegantly and evocatively describes the merging of the public and personal space within subway stations. A major point of his piece is how the subway “…station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area” (73). I related strongly to Lethem’s observations about the neighborhood, the station and the trains themselves both from the practical level as a lifelong subway rider, and for sentimental reasons. As a child and teenager, I constantly walked through the Hoyt Schemerhorn station –either on route to the apartment of my best friend, Devon (who lived two blocks from the station) or returning to the city. Whichever direction we were headed, we would take the F train at 2nd Avenue and catch the A at Jay Street Borough Hall and get off at Hoyt. In the act of riding the subway, Lethem identifies subway riders as
…an undercover officer in a precinct state of mind, noting and cataloguing outré and dissident behavior in his fellow passengers even while cultivating the apparent indifference for which New Yorkers are famous. (74)
When Devon and I rode the subway, we too became those undercover officers. We carefully noted our fellow riders starting with those who stood close to us on the platform. As children, Devon and I lived in un-gentrified neighborhoods and we were therefore studiedly careful but not overtly cautious. We learned early that subway stations and trains allow riders to physically be surrounded by strangers yet stay in their own bubble. Our fellow riders maintained their own habits in that underworld despite the crush of the crowd.

For most subway riders, the system itself is detrimental in enabling people to get where they are going. Subway riders establish rituals “(despite an appearance of chaos the system is regular” (75). Like city streets where crowds engulf the sidewalk, stations are overflowed with people, yet because of the smaller space and even danger of the tracks, there is also distance. Even when stations are crammed with people, there is still decorum. Most people do not shove and push on subway platforms (like on the streets). Lethem describes how he and his companion “…became spies on the adults, the office worker, tourists, beggars, and policemen who’d share segments of our endless trip” (75). Those who consistently use the subways live with a sense of expectancy - wondering who will be encountered on the subway platform - at what time, and where.
In other worlds, the subway simply transports individuals into their ritualized life, depositing them at a specific destination. In the subways, there is always a sense of unknown, the idea of encountering the unexpected. My mother has never forgotten one Christmas twenty two years ago, the sight of a man with a Christmas tree on the L line going to Williamsburg. Lethem calls subway stations “…a sinkhole of destroyed and thwarted time” (79). For me, subways are spaces which redefine the entire concept of time i.e. delays can be unexpected and sporadic or dramatic and pronounced –adding a whole level of drama to the routine of commuting from one place to another.